I've been toying with this idea of emergent synchronicity lately. The idea is that, without deliberate synchronization between two entities or even any communication what-so-ever, two entities can become highly synchronized. The basic idea is that similar systems would be established in these two entities such that their progressions would converge. This frequently happens naturally in both biological and social evolution. The crab form has been converged to many times. Menstration cycles synchronize without any explicit communication between women. We see similar inventions, constructs, and aspects of culture repeated across many different cultures. Socially, this idea is particularly interesting. I think that, naively, communication is assumed to be primarily contained in the communication itself, but I don't think that's often how communication works practically. Computer systems communicate with a shared knowledge and understanding of metadata. Besides details like format and metadata, there's also the massive amount of context that humans bake into the processing of communication and data between machines. Humans are similar. When you listen to someone talk, there's a huge number of assumptions you go into that conversation with. in general, navigating and establishing the assumptions for a conversation before the conversation itself is a huge amount of work. If you can communicate well with someone, chances are, you're able to do a decent amount of simulation of their principles in order to know what they're going to do. you don't need to spell out the details of everything you're saying. you can respond with simple yes/nos or even just gestures. alternatively, you can take advantage of this efficiency in order to communicate much more richly with other people (my personal preference). you can respond in a variety of ways that combine a ton of ideas and internal feelings into a simple sentance. If someone close to me asks me what i want to eat, and I say something like, "i'm just gonna die", that statement by itself might communicate, "I'm feeling pretty bad (although not so bad that I can't make a joke) so i don't want to put any energy into figuring out what i might want to eat, but if you figured out something i would probably like and made the choice for me, i would really appreciate that, although i don't want to put that pressure on you if you're not feeling up to it." There's an idea that it's unreasonable to expect your perspective in other people. However, this is the basic expectation of empathy - that the system in other people's brains can be simulate local systems with enough accuracy that one can anticipate what might be helpful or valuable without that information needing to be explicitly communicated. This idea creates some interesting relationships. It connects the ability to develop and act upon a series of a priori statements and convert them into outcomes to relating to other people. It implies the ability to follow a complex series of logical connections is useful in a similar way in both the case of understanding a technical system as well as understanding a person. A example of this is the [Blue Eyes puzzle](https://xkcd.com/blue_eyes.html). This also has some interesting implications about the various ways that people connect. A classic question is whether people connect with exposure to one another or whether some intrinsic quality helps people connect. This formalism implies a system by which connection happens - if a person's mental state has developed in a single way so stronly that it's unlikely to develop in new ways or towards new things, then it's impossible for those people to be able to converge meaningfully with people that haven't developed in that way. If a person mental state remains in flux (something fairly unlikely over time just from a systems standpoint), then it's possible that their mental state can converge with another person's, even if the internal systems between them are quite different. if we draw upon a systems perspective, we can anticipate a few common outcomes. one of the most common is a balance of negative feedback loops, where no values or goals in particular is considered to be particularly bad or good and where extremes don't exist. the negative feedback loops are probably usually prototyped by the format that adhering too closely to any values or goals isn't ideal and meaningfully sacrificing any value should be avoided, even when those strong sacrifices could result in even greater benefits. It's really easy for me to be biased about this kind of thing, but it very much does feel like most people are held by a balance of negative feedback loops. Maybe it's more accurate to say that this is the middle of the bell curve. of course, it's possible that some positive feedback loops appear, which is where i think things can get fairly interesting. as in nature, i think positive feedback loops in mental systems continue until they exhaust all possibilities for growth. maybe personality can be described as the imprint of previous positive feedback loops. let's consider a few concrete examples. I think that a focus on money is a natural way in which positive feedback loops can emerge. The loop might simply start with wanting something that costs money. This naturally creates a desire to get money, but it often costs money in order to make money. you might want to sell something, but in order to get something to sell, you need money in the first place. If a person develops such that their needs and wants are recursively prevented by a lack of money, it makes sense that that person will fixate on money as an important thing. of course, once this happens, more possibilities for positive feedback loops can emerge. getting money makes getting money easier. if you focus on money as a way to get things, your mind pattern matches towards strategies that use money over other things. Having a lot of money or being money focused pushes you to become friends with others who are also money focused, which validates your belief and focus on money. Of course, there are the natural limits that this reaches. First, your natural ability to make money might hit a wall. If you're well connected or born into wealth, you may never reach this wall, but other people might end up in a bad work situation where their work doesn't meaningfully influence how much money they make or how happy that additional amount of money makes them. This kind of hard shock can cause people to re-evaluate their positive feedback loops and start building their perspectives in new directions. This example was simple in that it had a simple to understand perspective (a focus on money) and only involved a single positive feedback loop at a time, but of course the positive feedback loops that exist in people can be much more complex and layered. Let's turn this conversation inward. One of the really appealing things about this idea of emergent synchronicity is this idea that plenty of other people exist that have gone down a similar chain of positive feedback loops, that the mental technology, the habits and perspectives that they've developed are likely to be similar to mine. There's an idea that when someone meets someone new and they just click, this is basically what happened - two people that went through an internally similar process of mental cultivation and reaction happen to meet one another. earlier i talked about mental systems either being in a state of flux or convereged. I think probably that this is not the right mental model. Probably mental systems are in a state of convergance until those mental systems are disrupted. there's a detail here - the nature of convergance is such that choices made by the system of convergance are likely to perpetuate the convergance. This is obviously not always true, but I think it is a predictable response. In the context of two people connecting, it sounds like the mental states of two people have to be meaningfully similarly convergant for a connection to exist. If multiple people experience the same trauma, it can often disrupt the patterns of convergance in similar ways. what does this mean for me? well, it means that if i want to develop better and more human connections, I have two strategies available to me - find people with similar mental adaptations as I do OR experience similar trauma as other people.